Comic Invective in Ancient Greek and Roman Oratory

Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110735666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire ancienne et classique

This volume acknowledges the centrality of comic invective in a range of oratorical institutions (especially forensic and symbouleutic), and aspires to enhance the knowledge and understanding of how this technique is used in such con-texts of both Greek and Roman oratory. Despite the important scholarly work that has been done in discussing the patterns of using invective in Greek and Roman texts and contexts, there are still notable gaps in our knowledge of the issue. The introduction to, and the twelve chapters of, this volume address some understudied multi-genre and interdisciplinary topics: first, the ways in which comic invective in oratory draws on, or has implications for, comedy and other genres, or how these literary genres are influenced by oratorical theory and practice, and by contemporary socio-political circumstances, in articulating comic invective and targeting prominent individuals; second, how comic invective sustains relationships and promotes persuasion through unity and division; third, how it connects with sexuality, the human body and male/female physiology; fourth, what impact generic dichotomies, as, for example, public-private and defence-prosecution, may have upon using comic invective; and fifth, what the limitations in its use are, depending on the codes of honour and decency in ancient Greece and Rome.

Part I: Intertextual and Multi-genre Invective

Comedy and Insults in the Athenian Law-courts

Jasper Donelan

Abstract

This paper first presents similarities between the insults spoken by characters in Old Comedy and those employed by litigants in the classical Athenian law-courts. The comparison demonstrates how Old Comedy and Athenian legal oratory relied (albeit with a few important exceptions) on shared topics of invective as well as an overlapping vocabulary of abuse. The discussion then progresses to the way that insulting language is talked about in the preserved law-court speeches. Litigants claim that certain insults could offend the judges’ sensibilities. There is, moreover, evidence of formal restrictions on the use of invective in the public sphere. Nevertheless, it appears that judges did enjoy hearing opponents exchange insults and that they could — much like audiences of comedy — respond to this with delight and laughter. This paper concludes by arguing that litigants in Athens faced two competing pressures: on the one hand, to make a pertinent, respectful, and logical case against their adversary, but on the other, to satisfy the judges’ desire for pleasurable and often baseless invective.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2019 FIEC/CA conference in London. I would like to thank Sophia Papaioannou and Andreas Serafim for their invitation to contribute to this volume. Many thanks also to Francesco Mari for sharing his thoughts on a draft and to Jon Hesk, who not only read and critiqued the paper in its final stages, but also sent me a copy of his unpublished essay “Vicious humour and virtuous argument in the Attic orators”. Unfortunately, Deborah Kamen’s book Insults in Classical Athens appeared too late for me to take its arguments and analysis into account.

1 Introduction

The use of personal, let alone humorous invective might, to a modern observer, seem inappropriate during legal proceedings for crimes carrying penalties as weighty as political disenfranchisement or execution. In the corpus of Attic orators, however, which contains speeches composed for just such settings, there are multiple instances of litigants insulting their adversaries, and often with language similar to that of the verbal abuse found in Old Comedy. In this contribution, I wish to explore that phenomenon and advance arguments about what the use of insults meant for Athenian orators as well as for the judges they hoped to persuade. I first consider the similarities between the insults of Greek oratory and those of the dramatic genre of Old Comedy, reinforcing but also adding nuance to the work of scholars who have established parallels between the invective in the two genres. The discussion then progresses to the anticipated effects of invective on the judges and the way that verbal abuse is talked about in the speeches. Demosthenes criticises the use of insults, yet this stands at odds with their prevalence in Greek oratory, not least in Demosthenes’ own surviving work. This discrepancy is discussed in the conclusion, where I suggest that Athenian litigants could find themselves needing to navigate a path between, on the one hand, indulging their audiences’ desire for enjoyable insults and, on the other, presenting themselves as moderate speakers capable of making cogent legal arguments.

2 Invective in Old Comedy and the Law-courts: Thematic and Verbal Similarities

The resemblances between comic and politico-judicial invective in classical Athens have not gone unperceived. Heath, for example, in his study of Aristophanes and the discourse of politics, uses Aristophanes’ Knights to demonstrate continuity between the disparagement of rivals on the Old Comic stage and that of rivals in the political struggles that played out in Athens’s law-courts.¹ Heath wants to show that Aristophanic drama is political because it mimics or echoes patterns of real-life political discourse. In support of this thesis, Heath notes how in Knights, the character Paphlagon is accused of deception, flattery, slander, sycophancy and corruption, is charged with exploiting fear for his own political ends, colluding with foreign powers, undermining the principles of democracy, being of foreign or servile origin, being sexually depraved, having no shame and, finally, of adopting a vulgar rhetorical style. Following this roll-call of the Aristophanic Paphlagon’s crimes and character flaws, Heath goes on to identify, and again enumerate, plentiful instances in the speeches by both Demosthenes and Aeschines of precisely these same charges – sycophancy, deception, sexual depravity, collusion, servile origins, shamelessness, a deplorable speaking style and so forth – thus pointing to a distinct overlap in the topics of Athenian comic and Athenian judicial invective.² Speakers in the two genres drew their derogatory accusations, Heath concludes, from the same pool of negative traits and behaviours. The shared motifs of verbal attacks, regardless of whether these provoked laughter, show that legal rhetoric and Old Comedy depended on a similar value system for the vilification of opponents.

The likenesses that Heath observes between the topics of invective in Old Comedy and those of judicial oratory are perhaps unsurprising. They occur not so much because comedy displays a keen interest in politics and the law (although that is a factor, as Konstantakos demonstrates in this volume), but rather because the two genres evolved and flourished under the same cultural conditions and invective typically reflects, in inverse fashion, the attributes or behaviours that a given community deems desirable. It is only insulting to say that someone employs a vulgar rhetorical style if one’s cultural group, and especially the addressee as well as any immediate audience, finds a vulgar rhetorical style to be objectionable. Insults operate, as Koster recognises in his study of Greek and Roman invective, against the backdrop of cultural norms and attempt to locate targets beyond the boundaries of those.³ Successful speakers will tap into the “social presumptions held by [an] audience” in order to depict their opponents as marginalised deviants.⁴ Seen in this light, the types of comic and politico-legal invective catalogued by Heath emphasise a distinction not only between the speaker and the addressee (viz. you belong to a negative category that I, the insulter, do not), but also between the insultee and the wider group – here Athenian citizens – from which the target is distanced. In the democratic law-courts of classical Athens, this could have been an effective way to alienate opponents from the judges and establish oneself as a relatable and therefore trustworthy narrator of events.⁵ Finally, as discussed in the Introduction to this volume, if the insults and invective also draw laughs from the judges, this can help ingratiate the speaker with the audience, while the target suffers a double disgrace, experiencing not just the affront of the verbal abuse, but also the humiliating laughter of their peers.⁶

Invective’s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Killing with a Smile: Comic Invective in Greek and Roman Oratory
• Part I: Intertextual and Multi-genre Invective
• Part II: The Cultural Workings of Invective
• Part III: Invective in Ancient Socio-political Contexts
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• General Index
• Index Locorum